Brooklyn, N.Y. …It was April 1940.
Six months had already passed since the invasion of Poland by the Germans and the Russians the prior September. Most of the killing should have stopped by now.
Little did the Polish people know what was in store for them from the Germans and the Russians who now occupied their country.
Their Springtime was about to become just as cruel and bloody as the winter they just lived through. It was to be the time of Katyn and Auschwitz.
The Downstate N.Y. Division of the Polish American Congress will mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre and the opening of the Auschwitz concentration camp with special observances at its annual meeting on Sunday, June 13 at the Polish & Slavic Center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Participating in the event will be Auschwitz survivors, Polish war veterans and members of the Children of Polish Christian Holocaust Survivors.
The recent release of Russian documents about Katyn confirmed that the Communists began a systematic murder of at least 22,000 Polish army officers, priests, university professors, doctors, lawyers and other professionals on orders from the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin.
The barbaric 1940 orgy of terror and death lasted through the months of April and May. Most of the executions took place in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, the site of the April 10th plane crash that recently killed the president of Poland and many government and military officials.
And – as if the Katyn murders were not enough of a Polish tragedy – the Germans who were in control of the other half of occupied Poland decided to begin operations at the infamous Auschwitz death camp on June 14th.
They opened it on that day by sending 728 Polish prisoners from Tarnow, the first transport ever. For the first two years of its existence, the majority of inmates in Auschwitz were Polish. Mass transports of Jews did not begin until Spring, 1942.
World War II officially ended in May, 1945. “For everyone else but not for Poland and several other countries in Eastern Europe,” said Michael Preisler, co-chair of the Polish American Congress Holocaust Documentation Committee and an Auschwitz survivor himself. “The Russian army would not leave Poland until 1993.”
Contact: Frank Milewski,
pacdny@verizon.net
